ART & LANGUAGE

From December 16, 2005 to February 4th, 2006
Tuesday – Friday 12-6, Saturday 11-4

Art & Language are among the founders of a movement that became known 
as Conceptual Art.  Their activities have been marked from the outset by 
practical variety, by resistance to easy categorisation and by a tendency to 
provoke open and reflexive enquiry.  Art & Language’s earliest works date 
from before 1968, when the name was first adopted as the name of an 
artistic practice.  In the following year, the first issue of the journal Art-
Language was published in England.

The name Art & Language thus signifies an artistic authorship over the 
course of almost forty years.  Where more conventional artist-authors are 
concerned it is the narrative of a single life that tends to organise disparate 
production into an apparently coherent development.  If the individual named 
by Art & Language has a single life, however, it is in the continuity of a 
transforming and self-transforming conversation that that life must be 
looked for.

It was at Documenta 5 that Art & Language first represented its conversation 
in the form of an Index.  And what that index produced was not a narrative, 
but a series of possible connections across and within a conversational 
world.  A large number of individual texts were made, as it were, to speak to 
each other, to interrogate each other, to argue with each other.  These texts 
could not be read according to any chronological sequence; rather they were 
connected by relations of compatibility or contradiction or were separated by 
the incommensurability of their respective logical worlds.  It was left to the 
individual spectator to enquire into the material provided, using the indexing 
system as a map on which alternative possible pathways were marked. Over 
and above any interest that the spectator might have in the specific details of 
propositions and arguments, reading was accomplished as the intuitive 
representation of a social and intellectual structure – a form of ‘seeing’.  And 
insofar as that ‘seeing’ was itself a consequence of a ‘writerly’ activity, the 
spectator as passive consumer died to be reborn not only as a reader, but 
also as a re-describer – a conversationalist of sorts.

This seems a not undesirable outcome.  It is one which has born upon the 
subsequent practice of Art & Language.  Conceptual Art may entail a way of 
making art.  If it is one in which painting as traditionally understood can only 
be sentimentally pursued, it is not necessarily one in which the possibility of 
internality is ruled out.  What may be ruled out is the idea of an oeuvre as 
unified by some biologically authenticated style.  A conversational practice 
will tend to rule against certain kinds of consistency and purification.

In 2004 Francisco Baena wrote: ‘What’s certain is that Art & Language has 
managed to resist the powerful, mystifying influence of the “institutional 
theatre” with self-critical rigour.  In their words “What we sought was a social 
world where and through which the work could express itself verbally”.  And 
this took them to a “context of conversational concentration” to which they 
committed themselves from the get-go (an autobiographical but anonymous 
introductory text talks of their artistic beginnings as “an effort to reflect the 
conversational base of their activities”).  It’s one of the strong points of their 
ethics.  And the exhibition catalogue is exemplary in this respect, 
accompanying the presented works with (fragments of?) conversations about 
the works, of a very pertinent order (more so than that of the expository 
space) […] But their work doesn’t exhaust itself in the application of 
Chomskyian, pragmatic, Wittgensteinian, Searlean  (etc.) notions to the art 
system.  On the contrary, they find ways to extract from all that 
consequences that are plastic, literary and political, in an exercise of 
exemplary intensity that, lamentably, isn’t seen often on the institutionalised 
and dominant scene.’

The works in this exhibition at Galerie Grita Insam are described by the 
artists as ‘genre-scenes of spatial and cultural displacement’.  These are 
texts and images in disorder or jouissance. They are tears in the fabric of two 
worlds.  One of these worlds is composed of ‘generic art’, the world of the 
aesthetically indiscernable, the other of works of art that make some 
marginal claim to autonomy or internal complexity. 

The exhibition consists of three groups of works.  The first group consists of 
three sets of three jigsaw puzzles, Desert I, Desert II and Desert III.  In 1967, 
Art & Language produced a set of three map prints, Map to not Indicate, Map 
of Itself, and Map of the Pacific Ocean West of Oahu.  These maps have been 
re-worked as difficult-to-execute jigsaw puzzles.  The blank or minimal 
surface of the map has been cut into chunks and reassembled.  Surfaces that 
depend for their significance upon a precise connection between drawn 
space and text on an uninterrupted surface are now reconfigured as a broken 
surface – indeed, as composed, perhaps, of three-dimensional parts. Two of 
the maps in each set have been further disfigured by pieces whose surfaces 
are neither white nor thoroughly flat. Instead, they are grey or brown and 
abrasive.  We might ask if the surface is about to be remade as something 
not for the eye – as something that first implies touch and then a loss of 
surface – a wearing away.  These are maps whose logic has fallen apart.  In 
being fragmented and in beginning to replace these fragments with alien 
surfaces, the original logic of the maps is unsustainable.  What then would 
one add to their inscriptions?

A second group consists of two works bearing the generic title One of the 
Strings is Exhausted. These are self-portraits and genre scenes.  The 
monochrome figures are painted on coloured photographic prints.  The 
photographs recall a permanent installation of Art & Language’s Dialectical 
Materialism of the early to mid 1970s at La Bainerie near Angers in France.  
These works are installed in an oval room.  The figures, in various states of 
despair and agitation, are a stain upon the image of their own installed work.

The third group also consists of two works titled Official Hope Returns I and 
Official Hope Returns II. Charles Harrison has written: ‘Each work is 
composed of a decorative plaid – a pattern of intersecting coloured 
horizontal and vertical stripes.  These might be see as referring obliquely to 
paintings by Kenneth Noland that appeared in the mid-1970s as the last 
gasp of high-modernist post-painterly abstraction, though their more certain 
origin is in Art & Language’s Index: Wrongs Healed in Official Hope of 1999.  
That work was composed of coloured canvas plinths and wall panels based 
on the format of Art & Language’s Documenta Index of 1972.  These were 
decorated with a sado-masochistic pornographic text, that was first 
transformed into a series of malapropisms, and then subject to gradual 
reduction by means of a computerised editing programme.  Where the text 
ran out before the last of the panels was reached, it was replaced by a 
decorative plaid.  

[…] Wrongs Healed was a large work designed for installation in a museum, 
and where there was adequate tonal contrast the text was quite legible.  Each 
of the current plaids is the size of an easel-picture suitable for a modest 
domestic interior.  However, each is accompanied by a number of texts, 
printed on poster-sized sheets of paper and glued to the floor.  From a 
normal viewing distance the stripes of the painting appear lightly textured 
and slightly feathered at the edges, as though according to the weave of the 
canvas.  Seen closer-to, the texture of each coloured strip resolves into lines 
of darker tone.  The spectator who approaches to the limit of proximate 
vision will perceive that these lines are composed of printed texts, reduced to 
the very threshold of readability.  In fact each stripe on each canvas is printed 
from end to end with writings by Art & Language.  The printed posters 
provide indications of the contents of these texts, reduced to summaries and 
indexed to portions of the painted plaid at the rate of one paper page to the 
contents of one square’s length of painted canvas stripe. The posters are 
glued to the floor so as to face the plaid which is hung on the wall.  The 
viewer must turn her back on the plaid if she is to read the summary.

[…] In the historical development of painting, the dialectic between form and 
detail was a significant concern of formal analysis and aesthetic criticism.  It 
might be said that what’s left of the interest in artistic detail is now often 
satisfied by literal practices of reading – that is to say by the textual and 
often academic discourses into which certain artistic objects are readily 
subsumed.  

[…] The effect of Art & Language’s new paintings is not to resolve the 
supposed dichotomies (or the lack of them) between ‘looking’ and ‘reading’ 
or between the decorative and the discursive, but rather to increase the 
challenge for any cultural theory that might seek authoratively to thematise 
their relations’.
GALERIE GRITA INSAM
An der Hülben 3, 1010 Wien, T 0043-1-512 5330